


Five Computers Angel Didn't Like

by cofax



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: 5things, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 03:33:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6221986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 2009 More Joy Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Computers Angel Didn't Like

1\. The desk-top computer Cordelia bought, for the billing. Except every time he walked past, she was reading some gossip website, and chewing her nails. The more time she spent on it, the more unhappy she got. After the office blew up, he refused to replace it.

2\. The computer in his cell phone. He's not _stupid_ ; he knows a cell is basically a computer. But it's stupid and it doesn't work and it goes off when he's hunting through the sewers, when he has to be quiet. Or it doesn't go off at all, and he doesn't find out for hours that Wesley was trapped behind the 7-Eleven by a Chusia demon. It's false reliance, and he finally leaves it on the reception desk until it stops beeping for good.

3\. The police keep computer records, he knows. He's certain he's in there, in one incarnation after another. It wasn't as though he cared, for a long time. And if he didn't kill anyone, not for decades, he wasn't entirely invisible. 

You can live off the grid, but the grid finds you. Even if he hadn't been too close to human trouble too many times, Wolfram and Hart would have made sure of it.

He wonders, sometimes, what those files actually say about him.

4\. When he takes over the LA office, they give him a computer. It's a _laptop_ , they say, although he sees no reason he would ever put such a thing on his lap. It's sleek and silver, and they assure him it has all the latest in _messaging technology_.

It whirrs and hums at him; he suspects it's possessed. He is absolutely certain the Senior Partners have it bugged somehow. This is Wolfram & Hart, after all. 

After four months, they take it away, and his messages arrive on little slips of pink paper, in Harmony's heiroglyphic handwriting.

5\. He spent nearly a century and a half terrorizing humanity, killing for food, for fun, for boredom. No one could stop him, and those who tried, he broke into pieces. 

Now he knows: for all that time, and after, the Watchers' Council tracked him. They compiled lists of his crimes, named his victims, documented his atrocities. 

Everything he did, in Ireland and England, in Vienna and Paris and Beijing. And in Sunnydale and Los Angeles. All written down in those moth-eaten volumes, and scanned or transcribed into neat databases. Green letters on black backgrounds, naming the deaths he caused across the years. Documented for posterity, so that three centuries from now the name _Angelus_ will still be known.

When word finally reaches LA about the destruction of the Watchers' Council, Angel allows himself a moment of pleased relief. Just a moment, because there is work to be done. But for the next months, it feels sometimes as though a shadow has lifted, as if maybe there is a future now, unburdened by the stains of his past.


End file.
